Year: 2014

By David Lawder WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The Congressional Budget Office on Tuesday reduced its estimate of the U.S. budget deficit for the current fiscal year but said sluggish economic growth and stubbornly high unemployment will cause the improvement to be short-lived. The CBO said the deficit will fall to $514 billion in the fiscal 2014 year ended September 30, down from its previous estimate of $560 billion and a fiscal 2013 deficit of $680 billion. The deficits will start to grow steadily thereafter as the economy struggles with an unemployment rate that fails to fall below 6.0 percent until late 2016, the non-partisan budget referee agency said. The report may take some immediate pressure off of Congress for further deficit reduction, but makes clear that there are still major fiscal challenges ahead associated with the cost of caring for the fast-retiring Baby Boom generation and a chronically low participation in the labor force among Americans.

The late actor may have been trying to kick drug habit.        

"Play To Cure: Genes in Space" may look like a space flight simulator — and technically speaking it is — but the maps that players use for navigating their spacecraft are actually cleverly disguised pieces of genetic data. Developed by Cancer Research UK in collaboration with programmers from Amazon, Google, Facebook and games studio Omnisoft, the free app is available to download for iOS and Android devices. The aim of the game is pretty simple: to plot a course through what look like asteroid fields in order to collect something called ‘element alpha'. However, the fields are actually data gathered from 2,000 patients with breast cancer — data which, if thoroughly analyzed, could lead to better testing procedures and treatments in the future.

By Genevra Pittman NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – Half of parents with an overweight or obese child think their kids are slimmer than they actually are, according to a new review of past studies. In 69 studies of more than 15,000 children, researchers found many parents with an overweight child thought their son or daughter was at a healthy weight or below. "We know that parents play a very crucial role in preventing childhood obesity, and interventions are most successful if they involve parents," said Alyssa Lundahl. "Previous research has found that when parents' perceptions are corrected, they do start to take action and encourage their children to become more active and maybe turn off the TV and go outside and play," she told Reuters Health.

Woody Allen's lawyer defended the filmmaker on Tuesday after renewed allegations of sexual abuse by his adopted daughter, Dylan Farrow, and questioned the timing of her comments. So all of a sudden we're seeing these allegations surface again, and one has to wonder why," Elkan Abramowitz told NBC News in an interview. "The case is over – there is no case." Last week, Farrow repeated her allegations in a letter published by The New York Times. She said Allen sexually assaulted her in the Connecticut house where she lived with her mother, Allen's then-girlfriend Mia Farrow.

Dietary sodium has been linked to obesity in previous studies. "Our study and studies looking into national data all show that average dietary sodium consumed is 3,300-3,400 milligrams daily in children, as high as that of adults," Dr. Haidong Zhu told Reuters Health in an email. The American Heart Association recommends that everyone keep sodium intake to less than 1,500 mg per day, but 90 percent of children exceed that amount, Zhu noted. Those in the top third of sodium intake weighed approximately four pounds more than those in the bottom third, on average – about 149 pounds versus 145 pounds.

Shares of Furiex Pharmaceuticals Inc more than doubled in value after the company said its experimental drug significantly alleviated diarrhea and abdominal pain associated with irritable bowel syndrome in two large late-stage trials. Furiex said it would apply by mid-year for U.S. approval of the drug, eluxadoline, to treat diarrhea-predominant irritable bowel syndrome (IBS-d), a debilitating bowel disorder that affects about 28 million people in the United States and major European markets.